StATS: Learning more about control charts (February 1, 2006).

Someone asked me about resources for learning how to use control charts. I have a web page that talks about quality control in general and shows some of the computational details of a control chart. It's just a draft, but it might help.

There are two excellent and very readable books that any beginner should look at:

There is software in SPSS that will compute control charts, and that is a nice place to start for us, because we already have a license for SPSS. The program R has a library, qcc, that produces

Shewhart quality control charts for continuous, attribute and count data. Cusum and EWMA charts. Operating characteristic curves. Process capability analysis. Pareto chart and cause-and-effect chart. cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/qcc.html

R is not an easy package to learn, but since it is programmable, you can possibly invest in a programmer who could set up a bunch of programs in R that you could access via a web server.

There is also a large amount of commercial software that you can buy. I don't have a lot of recommendations here, because I have not used any of this software.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. It was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 04/01/2010.

This page was written by Steve Simon while working at Children's Mercy Hospital. Although I do not hold the copyright for this material, I am reproducing it here as a service, as it is no longer available on the Children's Mercy Hospital website. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Control charts.